CORPUS: Pop Star Medium Workshop with BA Visual Culture graduate Alisha Tsoumbou Ward.

Pop Star Medium is an extension of Alisha Tsoumbou Ward’s final-year research project; she hosts a workshop to explore and discuss how fame constructs and circulates a spectacle of self. The work presents the artist’s own photocards, forming a repetitive field that reflects on the manufacturing of the pop star image and the blurred boundary between person and persona.

Photocards are small, collectable portraits of pop stars, popularised by K-pop. Situating contemporary photocards within a history of image circulation, from the 19th-century carte de visite to glossy photos of Diana Ross and The Supremes in Motown cassettes, to contemporary K-Pop photocard practices, we can see how fame is produced through image, performance, and repetition.

During the workshop, participants will be invited to make their own photocards, exploring the construction of ‘star image’ and what that reflects about contemporary attitudes towards fame and visibility. The resulting photocard is a portable token that sits between portrait, myth, and commodity. Each postcard takes 20 minutes to make, walk-ins are welcome between 2 PM and 3PM, Friday, 12th June, NCAD Harry Clarke House Foyer.

The Pop Star Medium Workshop is part of CORPUS: Making Visual Culture Public, a series of interventions, panel discussion, workshops and presentations, presented by BA Visual Culture graduates for NCAD Works 2026.